Managing your product catalog is a challenging aspect of online sales. You might need to publish hundreds or thousands of SKUs across various sales channels, like your marketplace and webstore.


Therefore, it is simple for your product data to become inconsistent and messy. Normalizing for all of your use cases can be laborious and time-consuming. Because it is simply too much to handle, many retailers settle for subpar product information. However, inaccurate product information can result in other issues, such as online product listings that are incomplete.


What you can do to improve eCommerce catalog management and what merchants typically face are outlined in the following.


Why does product information in your eCommerce store matter? Providing an optimized online experience necessitates product information. The foundation of shopping experiences is how you manage your product data, such as:


Product recommendations – Providing buyers with relevant product suggestions to increase average order values or upsell opportunities Confidence to buy – Giving buyers confidence that your product meets their needs How you manage your product data also affects important back office operations.


Go-to-market time: Be able to publish and update online product listings as needed. Financial and operating reporting: Ensures accurate reports of sales by SKU, costs by SKU, breakdowns by category, and when it's time to reorder more products.


Integration: Be able to map product data to your ERP to make sure the item is linked to the correct inventory counts or cu]stomer orders. So, what gets in the way of properly managing your product data? Product catalog integration is necessary to streamline the process.


The following are five of the most common issues that arise when managing your eCommerce product catalog. Does any of this sound all too familiar to you as a seller of eCommerce?


Keeping product listings up to date online: Managing product listings across multiple sales channels. Normalizing product data from suppliers or third parties. Expanding your product catalog. Managing complex product structures like serialized items or kits/assemblies. Keeping product listings up to date. A lot of businesses have to update their SKUs on a regular basis because of constant price changes, newly available products, or other reasons. IT hardware and office supplies catalog integration ensuring automatic updates thereby eliminating manual intervention.


Selling Through Multiple Channels: How do you list the same products effectively across multiple channels, such as marketplaces and online stores?

 

  • It is difficult to list products in multiple places because each channel has its own listing requirements. The product categories on Amazon and eBay are distinct. The way you display your product on your branded web store is also different from how you list it on a marketplace.


  • Listings that are tailored to each sales channel can take hours, which can slow down your product go-to-market time. Product data can easily become messy, resulting in listing errors like listing incorrectly or with insufficient information. 


  • Your suppliers and other third-party vendors frequently provide product data that only contains the most essential information and may be missing a number of attributes. It's also possible that the data is in the wrong format, with different data structures or spellings.


  • Suppliers do not have the same obligation to standardize product information as you do because they do not sell directly to consumers. Before you publish online, you must address these annoyances. This data must be normalized or cleaned, which is an urgent step in the process.


Adding More SKUs to Your Product Catalog: Adding more SKUs when you need to is difficult when your product catalog is already poorly organized. Either you have to clean up your SKUs or you have to live with the poor quality of your product data right now.


Managing Complex Product Structures: Depending on the products you sell, your product data structures may be more complex than others. A jeweler selling diamond engagement rings, for instance, must contend with the following challenging structures:


Items that are serialized—each diamond is a one-of-a-kind item Kits and assemblies—an engagement ring has a one-of-a-kind diamond, stone setting, and ring band style. Even an apparel company deals with matrix/variant products, which are products in which a single item can be available in a variety of sizes and colors.